Civilization: The West and the Rest with Niall Ferguson | Watch Online. Use one of the services below to sign in to PBS: You've just tried to add this video to your Watchlist so you can watch it later. But first, we need you to sign-in to PBS using one of the services below. You’ll be able to manage videos in your Watchlist, keep track of your favorite shows, watch PBS in high definition, and much more! You've just tried to select this program as one of your favorites. But first, we need you to sign-in to PBS using one of the services below. To get you watching PBS in high definition we need you to sign-in to PBS using one of the services below.
You'll be able to manage videos in your Watchlist, keep track of your favorite shows, watch PBS in high definition, and much more! Don’t have a PBS Account? Creating an account is free and gets you: Access to High-Definition streamingA personal area on the site where you can access: Favorite ShowsWatchlistViewing HistoryEarly access to exciting new features. In New Jersey Halfway Houses, Escapees Stream Out as a Penal Business Thrives.
And-from-1997-2008-things-got-grossly-unfair-all-of-the-wage-gains-went-to-the-top-10-the-wages-of-the-bottom-90-meanwhile-declined.jpg 590×413 pixels. Jeremy Rifkin: Deepening the Conversation on The Third Industrial Revolution. The Economist has devoted its April 21st issue to The Third Industrial Revolution. The magazine's editors and reporters present a stirring account of the merging interface between IT and manufacturing that is allowing anyone to become his or her own mini-manufacturer. It is now possible to design software that will instruct the creation of a physical product, layer by layer, that pops out of the printer just like we now do with text. 3-D printing is already being used in hundreds of companies to produce commercial products. What the editors at The Economist missed is that 3-D printing in only a small, but important, part of the larger Third Industrial Revolution that will not only transform manufacturing, but also the very way we conduct the totality of commercial life in the first half of the 21st Century.
The democratization of information, energy, manufacturing, marketing, and logistics is ushering in a new economic paradigm. Steven Pearlstein: The false choice between equality and efficiency. But for Ryan, fixing the economy isn’t just about eliminating the wrong incentives for the poor. It’s also about giving the right incentives to everyone else to work hard, invest and take entrepreneurial risk. So even in the face of massive budget deficits and incontrovertible evidence of rising income inequality, the Republican budget would also reduce taxes for those whose high incomes are proof not only of their superior productivity and job-creating prowess, but of their moral superiority as well.
No hammocks for them. As much as this parable of the undeserving poor and the deserving rich might offend our sense of justice, it carries a large kernel of economic truth. Economic systems that promise on equality of outcomes, whether of the communist or kibbutz variety, have repeatedly failed to deliver higher overall living standards than more market-based systems where significant gaps between rich and poor are tolerated. Or maybe not. If that story sounds a bit familiar, it should. Reverse Racism, or How the Pot Got to Call the Kettle Black - Magazine. In America "whites once set themselves apart from blacks and claimed privileges for themselves while denying them to others," the author writes.
"Now, on the basis of race, blacks are claiming special status and reserving for themselves privileges they deny to others. Isn't one as bad as the other? The answer is no. " I take my text from George Bush, who, in an address to the United Nations on September 23, 1991, said this of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism: "Zionism . . . is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people. . . . And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and indeed throughout history. " A Key Distinction What I want to say, following Bush's reasoning, is that a similar forgetting of history has in recent years allowed some people to argue, and argue persuasively, that affirmative action is reverse racism.
Young, Black and Frisked by the N.Y.P.D. How Companies Learn Your Secrets. Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk or a speeding car coming down the street.
So we’ve devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends — and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they’re formed, despite our best intentions. To understand this a little more clearly, consider again the chocolate-seeking rats. The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. The results were dramatic.
Not an April Fool. There is an app, currently on the Apple app store as a free download, called Girls Around Me. A couple of days ago, computer journalist John Brownlee wrote an essay about it explaining why he found it disturbing. I'd like to propose that it is symptomatic of a really major side-effect of our forced acculturation into Facebook's broken model of human social interaction—a broken model shared by all the most successful social networks, by design—and that it is going to get much worse, until it kills people. Quite possibly in very large numbers. I wish this was an April Fool's joke or a piece of dystopian near-future fiction. Unfortunately it isn't. First, a quote from John's essay on the subject of "Girls Around Me" (I strongly suggest you go read the whole thing, both for his analysis and for some screen shots showing what it looks like): Now, here's the point.
What "Girls Around Me" does is make clear just how useless Facebook's security settings are. What is Governance? | Francis Fukuyama. I’m beginning a new project at Stanford/CDDRL called “The Governance Project.” The intention is to focus on conceptualizing and measuring governance, and applying those measures to two specific countries, China and the United States.
The beginning point of the project is definition of governance that excludes the degree to which governments are either democratic or subject to a rule of law that constrains the executive. The reason for this is simple: it seems obvious to me that countries can be better or worse governed regardless of whether they are liberal democracies or not. Singapore is not Zimbabwe, despite the fact that neither is democratic. Separating the quality of the state from either the rule of law or democratic accountability is one of the foundational ideas in The Origins of Political Order. The reason I want to make this separation is to then be able to empirically evaluate the relationship of governance to democracy and the rule of law. The Conservative Mind - The Chronicle Review. By Corey Robin It's been a rotten few months for the nation's wealthiest 1 percent. From the senatorial candidacy of Elizabeth Warren to Occupy Wall Street, economic elites have faced a concerted attack on their riches and power, their arrogant and unaccountable ways.
And you can hear it in their voices, or at least the voices of their spokesmen. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor declared, "I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country. " Mitt Romney told an audience in Florida that "I think it's dangerous—this class warfare. " So rattled is George Will that he's been forced to pull out a playbook from an older time. After decades of "compassionate conservatism," "a thousand points of light," and "Morning in America," dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors.
Corey Robin’s ‘Reactionary Mind’ Stirs Internet Debate. U.S. Republican Party: "It's Even Worse than It Looks": Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein at U.C. Berkeley on May 18, 2012. Eric Schickler: Introducing our speakers today, I want to note it’s a really special pleasure to have these two individuals here because of both the role they have played in American politics and also the special connection that they have had to IGS and Berkeley over the years. Both of these individuals have been here many times before. They are old friends of Nelson Polsby who brought them into our orbit. So we have always had special access to many opportunities to hear from them.
As a faculty member here, I have really enjoyed that opportunity over the years. Tom Mann and Norman Ornstein play a special role in Washington. They provide the kind of systematic careful analysis that political science prides itself on providing, while also speaking in communication and dialogue with policy makers, journalists, and other non-academics in the Washington community. Tom Mann is W. I am now going to turn it over to Tom and Norman. It is a special occasion for us to be here. Over to Norman.
Only one party’s to blame? Don’t tell the Sunday shows. - The Plum Line. Posted at 03:52 PM ET, 05/14/2012 May 14, 2012 07:52 PM EDT TheWashingtonPost Last month, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published an Op ed and a book making the extremely controversial argument that both parties aren’t equally to blame for what ails Washington. They argued that the GOP — by allowing extremists to roam free and by wielding the filibuster to achieve government dysfunction as a political end in itself — were demonstrably more culpable for creating what is approaching a crisis of governance. It turns out neither man has been invited on to the Sunday shows even once to discuss this thesis.
As Bob Somerby and Kevin Drum note, these are among the most quoted people in Washington — yet suddenly this latest topic is too hot for the talkers, or not deemed relevant at all. I ran this thesis by Ornstein himself, and he confirmed that the book’s publicity people had tried to get the authors booked on the Sunday shows, with no success. Ornstein also noted another interesting point. Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years. Trends in American Values: 1987-2012 Overview As Americans head to the polls this November, their values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years.
Unlike in 1987, when this series of surveys began, the values gap between Republicans and Democrats is now greater than gender, age, race or class divides. Overall, there has been much more stability than change across the 48 political values measures that the Pew Research Center has tracked since 1987. But the average partisan gap has nearly doubled over this 25-year period – from 10 percentage points in 1987 to 18 percentage points in the new study. Nearly all of the increases have occurred during the presidencies of George W. With regard to the broad spectrum of values, basic demographic divisions – along lines such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion and class – are no wider than they have ever been. In recent years, both parties have become smaller and more ideologically homogeneous. How the Rich Get Richer. Written%20Version%20of%20Effects%20of%20Fiscal%20Policy. It's the Inequality, Stupid.
Want more charts like these? See our charts on the secrets of the jobless recovery, the richest 1 percent of Americans, and how the superwealthy beat the IRS. How Rich Are the Superrich? A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244. Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash. Winners Take All The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades' gains. Download: PDF chart 1 (large) PDF chart 2 (large) | JPG chart 1 (smaller) JPG chart 2 (smaller) Out of Balance A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States.
Download: PDF (large) | JPG (smaller) Capitol Gain Why Washington is closer to Wall Street than Main Street. Congressional data from 2009. How Much Do We Spend on the Nonworking Poor? The Republican primary field has recently decided to revive the Welfare Queen trope, perhaps in hopes that a bit of that old Reagan magic will rub off on them. The argument, as usual, is that there's a vast stream of federal money going to people who are sitting on their asses eating Cheetos instead of going out and earning a living instead. These people are being bred into dependence on Uncle Sam's tit and having their work ethics destroyed. So the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities decided to add up the numbers and figure out how much money the federal government spends on the nonworking poor.
The answer: about 10 percent of all federal welfare spending. How did they come up with that? CBPP's methodology uses census data to figure out exactly where program dollars are going, but you can get pretty much the same answer using a simpler, easier-to-understand technique. Step One is to list every federal welfare program. Is that too much? Who Actually Benefits From Federal Benefits? Roger Ippolito, a 74-year-old Korean War veteran, receives $450 a month in social security benefits.Amanda Voisard/ZUMA Republican candidates have lately been parroting Charles Murray's argument that our "entitlement society" has created a nation of deadbeats who would rather live off government benefits than find a job. In response, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) released a study earlier this week showing the fraction of government benefits that go to able-bodied workers.
Their estimate is about 9 percent. I linked to the CBPP study on Monday, and since their methodology was fairly complex, I added a back-of-the-envelope version that simply added up the benefits of programs that don't serve the elderly, disabled, or working poor. The next day I got an email from Arloc Sherman, one of the authors of the study. So what percent of each program goes to the elderly, disabled, or working poor? Eighty-three percent of Medicaid goes to the elderly, disabled, or working poor. On Winner-Take-All Politics. BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers & Company. PAUL PIERSON: I think a lot of people know that inequality has grown in the United States. But saying that inequality has grown doesn't begin to describe what's happened. JACOB HACKER: It's not the haves versus the have-nots. It's the have-it-alls versus the rest of Americans. BILL MOYERS: And… LINNEA PALMER PATON: This is supposed to be a government run by the people and if our voices don’t matter because we’re not wealthy, that’s really unacceptable and it’s dangerous.
[Funders] BILL MOYERS: Welcome. We begin with the question that haunts our time: Why, in a nation as rich as America, has the economy stopped working for people at large even as those at the top enjoy massive rewards? The struggle of ordinary people for a decent living, for security, is as old as the republic, but it’s taken on a new and urgent edge. BUD FOX: How much is enough Gordon? BILL MOYERS: Hollywood saw it coming. We make the rules, pal. It exploded at the top. GEORGE W. E-Mails Highlight Extent of Obama’s Deal With Industry on Health Care. The Big Money Behind State Laws. Congressional Budget Office - Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007. Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs. Corporate Profits Just Hit An All-Time High, Wages Just Hit An All-Time Low. Is Income Inequality Driven by Credit Booms?
Why Unions Matter: The Numbers. Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class. Apple’s iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China. Russia Steven Hanson. Prospect Theory.